Tips, ideas and suggestions to help you get your kids excited about reading and writing.

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

A great "travelling" word game

Here's another great word game.

Our family recently travelled to Ottawa. Early one morning, we broke out a game we'd brought called Scrabble Apple.

We really enjoyed it. What I like about it is that it's portable, all of the pieces go back in the apple when you're done, and there's no board to lug around.

As a literacy tool, it's great because you can play with it any way you want. There are rules, but essentially it's just a bag of letters that stack.

The traditional rules are: You put all the letters out, and each person turns over a letter. You try to make words with your letters; you get points for every word. A red letter doubles the points.

The twist is that the letters stack. So if you had the word BAG and I turn over an E, I can create BEG by putting the E on top of the A.

While gramma may have been better at creating words, our son was faster at re-creating words - so it sort of levelled the playing field and made it really fun. It was a toss-up as to who would win.

I'm going to play this with the six-year-old I'm working with. We'll play "find the vowels." The first person to turn over the vowels and say the sounds they make will win.

Hasbro sent me this game to try (but otherwise I'm in no way connected to them). I've seen another game in toy stores called Bananagrams, by a different company - in a banana rather than an apple. It seems to be the same idea, although they play it so the words connect, like Scrabble. I'm sure you can play that game any way you want as well.